Sandisk Extreme II 240GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

For many people, looking for a new SSD generally results in a SandForce powered drive being purchased due to the fact that the large majority of drives on the market have one of these very successful LSI made controllers at their heart. As with all things though, there is always going to be a set of pros and cons. On of the downsides for SandForce is its overall ability to handle incompressible data over compressible data. Typically we see this as a drop in the read and write speeds, but with the Extreme II using on of Marvell’s top end controllers and the same style of caching that we saw on the Ultra Plus drive not too long ago, the speeds right across the board are top end.

When its ground down to raw performance on the whole, the Sandisk Extreme II is one of the fastest drives on the market right now. This is a huge selling point for Sandisk and with the SSD market becoming more and more fierce and the number of competitors growing, being able to claim rights to the top such as this are hard come by. Given how far SSD performance has come on over the last few years, I can only but begin to wonder what the next step will be for a single drive. Granted there is always the option of RAID0 and with drives becoming more and more reliable in the long run whilst coming down in cost, it does make sense to some to do just that.

Mentioning cost, this is truth be told, the breaking point for the sale of most drives. The drive could be the fastest on the market, from a reputable brand with the right capacity, but if the price tag is not quite right, then sales are likely to suffer in the long run. Remarkably, given the above facts, the 240GB SKU of the Extreme II comes with a price tag of nigh on £150, working out at 62.5p/GB which is well below the £1/GB margin that we look for in any drive.

Overall I’m not just happy with this drive, I’m very impressed, I know that Sandisk do have what it takes to make top end drives, but i was never honestly speaking something that was going to perform this well right across the board, but this is just what I’ve been given.

Pros:

• Well known vendor
• Handles compressible and incompressible data just as well as each other.
• Fast read and write speeds
• ~95k read IOPs and ~78k write
• Amazing value for money

Cons:

• Controller not as well known as SandForce

 “The Extreme II line of drives from Sandisk are some of the best drives on the market today and should be a definite contender for the short list of parts on any new system build or even for an upgrade.”

Thank you to SanDisk for providing this review sample.